EDITOR'S PREFACE

THE purpose of this volume, as the title indicates, is to trace the relations of poets with the aspects of "their ain countrie," or with the scenes where they built their homes, or pitched their transient camps. "A wanderer is man from his birth," Mr. Matthew Arnold writes, and the habits of many poets have been nomadic. There is little of his native Devonshire in Coleridge; Sussex has no conspicuous part in the making of Shelley; the Muse of Byron is influenced rather by the Mediterranean than by Dee and Don. But other poets are home-keeping, like Wordsworth and Scott; their favourite scenes are those among which they were born and spent their years of boyhood and their later lives. Tennyson, too, had a strong attachment to his native "Brook"-in which, if The Miller's Daughter be autobiographic, he was a very idle angler-and to the level wastes of the Lincolnshire fen country. There are poets who "generalise" landscape; they give us “a practicable wood," a pasteboard cottage, a stream which

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punctually "purls," and the rest of the décor of the eighteenth century. Drayton, on the other hand, seems to have had minute knowledge of every bourne and beck, as well as of every river, in England.

Some poets, anxious, in Wordsworth's phrase, "to write with their eyes on the object," take notes of landscape, as painters make rapid pencil sketches. To take such notes on aspects of the atmosphere, of the hills, woods, and even the most retiring species of the vegetable kingdom, was the practice of Wordsworth and of his sister Dorothy. The ingredients thus collected might or might not come handy in the composition of a poem. Thus Dorothy Wordsworth would chronicle the circumstance that "the moon was immensely large, the sky scattered over with clouds. These soon closed in, contracting the dimensions of the moon without concealing her." This note of phenomena very familiar was made in Somerset. Coleridge read it, and did it into blank verse, in a pocket-book:

Behind the thin

Grey cloud that covered but not hid the sky,

The round full moon looked small.

The piece of local colour was now ready for instant use, in case Coleridge was writing a poem in blank Wordsworth also exploited Dorothy's note, in

verse.

1

his Night- Piece, lines 1-7. Finally, Coleridge, in Christabel (where the scene is Cumberland), did the note afresh into four lines, in the metre of that poem. All this learning Mr. Ernest Coleridge provides in his beautiful edition of Christabel. It is not probable that most of our poets made notes in this conscientious way; though Scott wrote down the names of the local wild-flowers at Rokeby, as he was to write a poem with Rokeby for its centre.

To every poet his own method. The artist, Mr. Walker, has visited and pourtrayed scenes familiar to the singers; the business of the authors in this volume has been to study the poets' relations to the landscapes with which they were best acquainted, and, in some instances, to describe these scenes in their changed aspects of to-day. In other instances, notably in the case of Shelley, the Poets' Country is the "Land of Dreams" (as Homer says), and the sky and sea, which are changeless in their changefulness.

The influence of the Nature which environed poets in their youth has not a scientifically calculable effect on their genius. The mountains and the sea, as in Wordsworth's sonnet, may inspire a love of freedom; but, in the case of Oliver Cromwell (as Mr. Matthew Arnold remarked in an early prize poem on that states

1 Frowde. London, 1907.

man), the same effect may be produced by the flat scenery of the Midlands. The method of Monsieur Taine, and of others who unhesitatingly discover, for all effects, causes in the local environment, is a method of merely popular science.

The Editor should perhaps explain that he was asked, single-handed, to write the studies which accompany the pictures in this volume. Having neither the leisure nor the necessary literary and topographical knowledge, he suggested that writers better qualified than he should be invited to select the poets and scenes preferred by them. He mentioned some names, and Mr. Churton Collins, Mr. Coleridge, Mr. Loftie, with Mr. Macmillan, kindly undertook their pleasant tasks. The Editor has not dreamed of suggesting any alterations in their expressions of taste and opinion when (as will happen in matters of taste) there is some lack of grace of congruity between his impressions and those of his fellowworkers.

A. L.